Major
new history of KZ Belsen confirms:No
gas chambers, not an extermination camp
[]

RIGHT:
SS
Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer,
commandant of Belsen, hanged by the
British

Friday,
November 6, 1998

Britain's
Holocaust Images

by
JOHN
JACOBS

Jo
Reilly, Belsen (published by
Routledge, London, at
£45)

IF
ONE WERE
to choose one word guaranteed, for the
British, to encapsulate the horrors of
the Holocaust, it would be "Belsen." No
one who has seen the footage of the
piles of corpses being bulldozed into
the mass burial pits can ever forget
it.

So,
it was the newsreels of the liberation
of Belsen that brought home to the
British public the existence of gas
chambers and the Nazi extermination
camps and the reality of Hitler's
"Final Solution."

Well,
no, actually. According to Jo
Reilly, it was more the case that
reports of the liberation confused the
public's understanding of all these
points. Belsen
had no gas chambers and was not an
extermination camp.

If
anything, it had been one of the less
brutalised camps, since one of its
purposes had been to hold some
prominent Jews for exchange with
interned Germans.

It
was only as the flood of inmates from
camps in Poland poured into Belsen in
the last months of the war that it took
on its familiar, hellish
character.

But,
for the British public, it was
inconceivable that there could have
been other camps that were even worse,
so people thought Belsen was as bad as
it got. This obscured awareness of the
existence of purpose-built
extermination camps in Poland, and the
policy they were designed to
implement.

Belsen
inmates (PHOTOS:
AR-Online/Belsen
museum)

Nor
was Belsen linked at the time with the
specifically Jewish tragedy, despite
the fact that Jews were the majority of
the inmates at the liberation. Again,
this obscured the reality of Hitler's
genocidal war against the
Jews.

After
the war, Belsen became a camp for
displaced persons. Reilly describes the
struggle between the surviving Jews in
the camp to establish their rights as
Jews, rather than as nationals of the
countries from which they had been
deported.

This
brought them into conflict with the
British government, which wanted to
repatriate nationals to their home
countries. Clearly this made no sense
for Jews whose communities no longer
existed.

The
British government was loath to concede
that Jews were different from other
DPs, reasoning that to do so would be
to follow Nazi ideology. They were also
worried that a strong Jewish presence
would inevitably lead to unwelcome
pressure for a Jewish
homeland.

In
the propaganda battles that followed,
the British were so afraid of the
resonance that the word "Belsen" would
have around the world that they renamed
the camp Hohne. The Jews, with equal
resolution, continued to call it
Belsen.

Reilly's
analysis is scholarly, meticulously
referenced and never less than
even-handed. When discussing the
British government's obstructive
policies, or the less-than-impressive
response of Anglo-Jewry to the plight
of European Jews after the war, she
always explains these "shortcomings" in
the context of the prevailing
ideologies or political realities --
for example, the delicate position of
Anglo-Jewry in the run-up to the
creation of Israel and the associated
terror campaign against the
British.

She
provides valuable insights into the
aftermath of that uniquely British
liberation, both in respect of its
meaning for the survivors, who had lost
everything, and in terms of the highly
charged politics of Anglo-Jewish
relations.

John
Jacobs is the director of Sussex
University's Holocaust studies
course.

Our
opinion

David
Irving writes: "After the war, when my
Mother took my twin brother and me on a
week's seaside holiday to the Isle of
Wight -- we were then aged eight -- I
remember her pointing to our skinny ribs
and exclaiming, 'You look like Belsen
boys.' We had no idea what she was talking
about, but the phrase clings to our
memory."